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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

Given my experience, RHEL is a favorite among enterprise environments. As such IBM will continue to pursue a strategy that forces people into that business funnel. They do not care who falls out of it, the ecosystem will only become more closed.

I think we need to be more realistic about where things are headed. SUSE? Market cap of 2.2 Billion, IBM paid 34 for RH. Ubuntu? Still not profitable. As we continue to see the tech sector cool and become more mature belts will tighten and things will consolidate.

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Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? If anything, this makes me feel like they're undervalued, especially now that they're the only company shipping an enterprise linux with an open source and privacy respecting (looking at you Canonical) base distro.

What I meant is what would prevent IBM or other large corporation from acquiring them as well?

They already have been, multiple times, nowadays they belong to Micro Focus.

In July 2018, Micro Focus International, SUSE's parent company since 2014, announced its plan to sell the business unit to a subsidiary of EQT Partners in the first quarter of calendar year 2019.[7][8] This acquisition was completed on 15 March 2019, making SUSE a standalone business. Under new ownership, their legal name is SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH.

I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though.

SuSE is owned by MicroFocus.

SUSE was sold to EQT in 2019 and went public in 2021.

I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though, and apparently they are an investment fund.

Sometimes I feel that a lot of tech companies are virtually behaving as hedge funds

Do you have a source for that? I was under the impression SUSE no longer had any ties to Micro Focus

Wikipedia?

Are you confusing EQT and Micro Focus?

    SuSE is owned by MicroFocus.
    ...
    I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though

As per the Wikipedia article, EQT still owns 75% of SUSE, not Micro Focus. Micro Focus is no longer involved with SUSE

> Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative?

I'd always assumed the MicroFocus acquisition of SuSE had something to do with OpenStack, and when OpenStack stopped being The Big New Thing, that impacted SuSE.

Basically:

* I was on the HP OpenStack team

* HP burned through over a billion on that, and sold the product off to SuSE

* Somewhere in the mix there, MicroFocus was divested from HP. Even working there, it was hard to follow, because HP also split into HP and HPE

* As various vendors lost interest in OpenStack (Cisco, EMC, VMWare, etc), SuSE replaced their CEO who was behind the acquisition in the first place

I talked to some SuSE folks about OpenStack at one of the VMWare conferences, and they seemed confident in it's future, and then just weeks later I read that they'd discontinued the product in it's current state

The entire thing is incredibly confusing because HPE also had two versions of OpenStack. "Helion Open Stack" and "Carrier Grade OpenStack" and they were two different teams.

I didn't think they really had to pay for the openstack assets, I didn't think they did anything with those. IIRC they had their own managed openstack contracts with their SLES customers before the acquisition, and were working on getting kube/paas offerings on top of that which they then scrapped for Rancher.

So I know they burned a bunch of money too, but I don't think it was on the HPC or other openstack assets (HPC was the public cloud openstack offering that I think got shutdown sometime around the HPE split)

SUSE is tenacious AF, you have to give 'em that. This could be an opportunity for them to grab some market share. I'd love to see it. I don't wish ill on Red Hat, either, but I'd love to see SUSE grow and be a stronger player here. It'd be good for the larger ecosystem.

I bet Microsoft will eventually buy Ubuntu, given their relationship on WSL and key distribution for Azure.

I've suspected this for a while as well. At one point GOOG would have been a good bet, but having turned down many potentials over the years they clearly don't have an interest. I could see MS buying Canonical (or Ubuntu), although there has to be enormous pressure against that from the Windows people.

Why should be pressure be from Windows people?

They just announced at BUILD 2023 the graduation of CBL-Mariner Linux distribution into "Azure Linux", and guess what else has same support level, Ubuntu.

https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/4c586f76-ad6e-444...

Naturally, they have plenty of other distributions being supported.

If anything, most likely it is the Azure focus that is partially responsible for the chaos of Windows GUI frameworks, as the teams have minimal resources to keep going.

But why? What would they gain? You think Microsoft is interested in Linux enterprise support?

Microsoft is very interested in any enterprise support it can monetize. Ignoring WSL (you shouldn't), you'd be surprised how much Linux runs in Azure. Buying Ubuntu lets M$ say "sure you can run Linux in our cloud. We have one right here, one we support, for a modest fee".

Yeah, but we all know Ubuntu is used because its beginner-friendly and free. Once it becomes paid, poof everyone switches to Debian.

Ubuntu is massive on cloud platforms. I'd bet bigger than even Debian. And IIRC even AKS runs on Ubuntu. At least last time I used it.

Because for many people, Ubuntu is the linux distro.

Why? Because it's free, and very simple to use, but if it becomes paid, no matter how good it is, devs will switch to something else, and the market will follow them, gradually.

That's an extremely reductionist/simplistic view of why people pick, use and/or discard an operating system. And, FWIW, Ubuntu isn't my primary cloud Linux.

Unless you can demonstrate to Microsoft that enterprise desktop Linux support ROI can ever rivals Window’s or their cloud bunsiness, they won’t be interested.

In fact, I’m pretty sure Microsoft doesn’t know what to do with the Windows business at this point. They really would love to dump it, but they can’t. Office is more profitable than Windows. Azure is more profitable that Office and Windows. If trends keep, Xbox will over take Windows. There is no growth potential anywhere in the Windows business. They tried hard with the Surface line to imitate what Apple has with OSX, but they failed. Surface didn’t become the de facto Windows hardware like the Mac is for OSX. It’s just a side hussle to see where it could lead in the future for them.

Microsoft already announced their “Azure Linux” distribution which is like Amazon is a fedora based Linux flavor that just lets them control the versioning of all user space rpm packages for a server/docker offering in Azure.

they have no interest in making this a full “Enterprise Linux” offering. as long as they can offer servers an docker images that are rpm compatible, they are good for now.

WSL is entirely kernel layer. So whatever your distro is, they are good with it.

Most of the threads here - where people describe the corporately driven business wants/desires - seem to recognize though that this is killing the holden goose.

Enterprises want RHEL because the staff know & use RHEL and the enterprise can get a support package for RHEL. If Red Hat no longer is in the public eye, if it's only a paid for Linux, the demand is going to dry up, vanish.

There's only one way to retain mindshare & market share & that's to keep RHEL in front of people. This current course of action almost guarantees that RHEL fades into irrelevance.

AIX would like to have a word...

Exactly. They will likely reduce costs and milk it as long as possible:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/ibm_aix_developer_job...

About 15 years ago the (German) company I worked at had a lot of their customers from different industries run on SLES. But over time many customers just weren't willing to sign up for OS support contracts anymore (and also switched from Oracle to MySQL). SLES/openSUSE never managed to get the same support from third parties and communities as CentOS/Fedora. With RHEL 6 we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL. This allowed to have a homogenous environment with and without enterprise support contracts.

We'll have to see where this is going. Certain enterprise software (like Oracle) requires the use of certified operating systems or you lose support. Oracle Linux looks like the more natural choice.

If you are using RH, or SUSE, it is because pointy hairs forced you to use RH or SUSE. So you are kind of trapped in that funnel.

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